Terence Flanagan (Dublin North East, Independent)
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170. To ask the Minister for Finance his views on a matter regarding the Revenue Commissioners (details supplied); and if he will make a statement on the matter. [37983/14]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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I am advised by the Revenue Commissioners that they implemented their current telephone system for callers to the PAYE 1890 lo-call service in 2005. 

Revenue uses an automated voice recognition service to collect the customer's PPS Number which has on average a 90% success rate at identifying the spoken PPS Number.  While every effort has been made to tune and refine the system to deal with all accents and inflections there are however times when it cannot recognise the number that is being spoken. The system will make several attempts to get the customer to repeat their PPS Number and after four unsuccessful attempts will place the customer directly in the queue for an operator.  Most unsuccessful attempts are usually due to background noise or bad quality telephony reception while the PPS Number is being spoken.

Revenue is constantly monitoring the performance of its voice activated service and looks to improve the quality of the customer's experience over the telephone.  I am further advised that when resources permit, Revenue will seek to invest further in their telephony system as it is now almost ten years old.

Regarding the length of time in the queue, this will always depend on the number of customers using the service at the time.  I am advised by the Commissioners that the average time in queue for the PAYE 1890 service is less than 6 minutes and not 20 minutes as stated in the details supplied.  The Commissioners further advise that at certain times, the wait time is significantly less than the average but they acknowledge that at certain peak times, the wait time can be longer. 

In order to manage the high volume of calls at peak times and to reduce the number of calls to operators, I am informed that Revenue also offers a variety of self-service options over the telephone to callers before they are connected to speak to an operator.  The self-service options include, inter alia, requesting the most popular forms and leaflets and finding out the status of any refund claims the caller may have submitted.  Unless the caller provides their PPS Number, the self-service options are not available.  An added benefit of the system capturing the caller's spoken PPS Number is that their call is routed directly to the correct office that is responsible for handling their call, thereby resulting overall in a speedier response.

I am also advised that, as is the norm with lo-call telephone numbers, the cost of a call is shared equally between the caller and Revenue.  The caller's telecommunications provider is the recipient of the call charge.

In addition to the 1890 services, the vast majority of routine Revenue enquiries can be answered by reference to comprehensive information leaflets, the PAYE Anytime Service and the Revenue On-Line Service (ROS) for business taxes.  All of these services are available at .